Tuesday, April 21, 2009

Li it so - lxu is khg tame pfle lue lid

I was looking at my old (very old) high school year book and I came across the following in the quote section:

Li it so - lxu is khg tame pfle lue lid

An obvious cipher. Amazing the author got away with it; less paranoia in those blissful pre-9/11 days. But that aside, I was intrigued as to what the message might be. I tried all the obvious stuff I could think of, some not so obvious, but couldn't crack it. The distribution of letters is roughly consistent with the distribution of letters in normal English writing, so there's no obvious signature of character translation. But I tried anyway, using character rotations from 0 to 25 characters:

Then I combined these with one-of-n samplings. But no luck. Then I tried reversing letter order and repeating the whole process. Nada. I even tried increasing the rotation count by ±1 each letter position. Zilcho. My brother-in-law pointed out thata sentence beginning with three two-letter words is rare, so I ignored the spaces. No help.

Obviously there's an issue of gamesmanship here. With something this brief, total obfuscation is fairly trivial. So it needs to be something fairly simple. Too complex, and nobody could solve it, and what fun would that be?

I was fairly embarrassed to be unable to break the code. I used to be fairly good at this sort of thing. But I was more embarrassed because I was the one who'd written it. It was my quote.